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Sunday, May 15, 2011

Ok so I've been putting off posting about our cruise forever, just because I know its going to either be a huge post, or multiple posts. But it's time. So here we go folks!

Getting on the ship was super easy. We arrived at about 11:00am and were told that there were some issues (they didn't go into detail) and that they wouldn't start checking people in for another hour or so. Well we were starving so we left to get some food, and came back at about 12:30. Just as we finished getting checked in, they started letting people onboard. We were probably within the first 300 on.

Our stateroom was ready to go for us. We had gotten a promenade view in hopes it would help my seasickness, and I really believe it did. We had a big window and more space in the room. Our room was comfy and the steward was great.

We ended up eating in the dinning room every night. We hadn't planned on it, but we loved the food and the service so much we just kept coming back. We had early seating, which was super early for us at 5:30. But we had found the late seating on our last cruise interfered with a lot of the evening activities. Turns out not many people like early seating, so we were able to get a table all to ourselves!

The dinning room was beautiful and our waiters were awesome. Mihai and George were from Romania and just excellent. The food was yummy, especially desert. Here's a few of my favorites.The chocolate sufle was my absolute favorite. We even tried escargot and it was pretty good! Chuck got a steak almost every night, in fact I think he got one 5/7 nights.

We went to several of the shows in the theater. They were ok. The singers and dancers were good, but there was a comedian on the last night. Honestly he wasn't that funny. He made some tasteless jokes that I found funny (haha) but the family in front of us were clearly offended. He also had a lot of jokes about if the ship sank, which I thought was a poor thing to joke about with so many kids at the show.

We went to several events ran by the cruise director's staff. Can I just say they were amazing. On our last cruise I never even saw the cruise director. This guy and his team were EVERYWHERE. We went to a disco party, saw them preform Fountains, and went to Quest and the nightclub. Plus they were at lots of the mini activities throughout the day.

Fountains was a skit put on after the last nights theater show. It was a parody taken from Monty Python. It was gross and hilarious all at once.

Quest....oh Quest. I was a little scared going into this. I had read things warning about quest. But no real details were posted. So we went. Oh my gosh is it fun! Adult, but fun! Chuck got called down to participate. He had to dirty dance with the skinniest guy in our section. They both whipped of their shirts and went at it. We won that challenge too and they made it on the cruise review video. It was hilarious. Our team came in 2nd place if I remember correctly. It was a great time. I lost my favorite lipstick however as it was needed in two different challenge and came back to me mascaraed haha.

As far as the ret of the time on the ship we had a great time. The first couple of days there was a lot of wind and they had a lot of the upper decks closed. We played mini golf three of the nights in the dark and wind. It was a ton of fun! We also went ice skating and saw the ice show, which was AMAZING! We did a digital scavenger hunt and swam in the pool, as well as hung out in the sports grill watching for hockey scores. The bar tender there was awesome! We also hung out on the helipad a bit which was beautiful. We saw lightening from there our last night and heard thunder, which sounds a lot different in the ocean. We had the best time at the Quest afterparty at the Vault. They had 2 DJs and lots of booze! Who knew we were the nightclub type!

OK! On to our first stop, COZUMEL!

Chuck and I were super excited about stopping here. Last cruise we were miserable with sunburn and didn't enjoy Cozumel. We decided we were going to go to their famous Playa Mia beach. Honestly we were disappointed. perhaps a storm had ran through recently, but the beach was dirty with tons of seaweed on the sand and no one was swimming. They made us keep our umbrellas closed because of the wind, which sucked for me since I burn so easily. BUT, there was an open bar!

We hung out at the beach for a few hours and decided to head back a little early. I didn't want to get burnt and not be able to enjoy our favorite place in Grand Cayman the next day. We did some waundering around the port and then headed back on board for lunch.

The next day was GRAND CAYMAN! Our favorite place ever!

We decided we would go back to the beach we went to the last time we were here. Royal Palm Beach. They had renovated a little bit and now had a pool with a swim up bar. Our taxi driver tried to talk us into into going to one of two other beaches but we weren't having it.

We got some nice front row beach chairs and an umbrella to protect me from the sun. We swam and snorkeled a little bit. Chuck snorkeled more than I did. He found a stingray even. We had a really great time and really enjoyed ourselves. Getting back on the boat wasn't too hard either. We hardly had to wait, but the waves were pretty bad and it did make me a little nauseous.

Our last stop was in JAMAICA!

We decided not to even bother getting off here. We origionally planned to go to a beach, but decided in the end we didn;t want to brave Jamaica after our last experience here. It was a beautiful day and the island looked gorgeous though. I can't wait until the new port is finished. It was still a mess while we were there, and partly why we didn't get off. Instead we went to Johnny Rockets and took a nap. It was a good time. :)

Disembarkation was easy peasy. Since we were taking our own luggage off we got to get off early. We got to walk right off and were in the car and going by 9:10. Now we can't wait to go on our next cruise!